‘Many adults say they cannot draw. They are right. They cannot.’
- Ken Robinson, Learning to be Creative, 2011, p. 159
Children, Ken Robinson says, follow a certain development in their artistic capacities up to around age 13. At this age, teenagers drop away as they no longer detect an ongoing development (2011, pp. 159-160).
Robinson’s statement might not be true of all adults, but it is mostly true of me. I gave up drawing when I was 13, and didn’t allow myself to take it up again until two years ago.
My artistic talents didn’t develop beyond those of a 13 year old. Compare these pictures I drew years apart, at 12 and 26.
There’s no discernible improvement across the years. At 26, I was drawing with the same skill, if not a little less skill, as my 12 year old self. You are correct, that is an attempt at H.R. Giger.
When I starting ‘doing artistic stuff’ again, I gravitated to activities needing no skill. The ongoing phenomenological study What Do You See? came out of that. Scribble drawings require no talent. There’s little pressure to perform, beyond choosing the colours my eye finds appropriate.
When I again took up the pencil to create a likeness, I could see my adolescent self in the lines on the paper. In the below picture, I was unaware at the time that I chose the colour schemes of my school uniforms. Those are waves as I learned to draw them in primary school.
This became a series of pictures I call the Autobiopictography project. I draw cartoons, as that’s what my brother taught me when we were children, and I never draw faces. This is as much a stylistic choice as a practical one. I can’t draw, and faces are complicated.
I attempted my first self-portrait — where self-portrait here means ‘including a face’ — in response to the Skillshare workshop, Mixed Media Illustration: Create a Self-Portrait with Watercolor, Gouache & More.
‘Self portraits can be quite therapeutic and an important way of expressing yourself’, says Maria-Ines Gul.
Gul’s class involves painting oneself in an item of fashionable clothing selected from a magazine or the internet. It is power-dressing in pictorial form. I chose a dress I’d once worn to an important dinner, made for me by friends, and toward which I had mixed feelings.
Gul’s instructions had me drawing a first sketch on printer paper. The sketch is flawed, but I felt that I’d captured something important.
Though Gul encourages using a light box to refine the sketch, and to avoid lines in the painting, I decided I’d draw a more symmetrical portrait onto my watercolour paper, and paint on that. Here you can see I drew it too big and cut off the headdress.
For this reason I fell back into Gul’s lesson plan. In the Skillshare video, Gul has a light box. Those who don’t have a lightbox can use their window. My windows are (dirty) glass louvres, so I pulled out a couple and rigged up my own unattractive but good enough ‘light box’.
The final product captures my confusion and the atrocious make-up I had on. It both does and doesn’t look like me. I think the face in this portrait is the one that adolescent would have painted if they’d been asked to imagine themself as an adult. And, yes, the process did give me a greater appreciation of the dress I wore.
